A portion of the disclosure recited in the specification contains material which is subject to copyright protection. This application includes a microfiche appendix consisting of 180 frames on two sheets containing source code listings that list instructions for a process by which the present invention is practiced in a computer system. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction of the specification as filed in the Patent and Trademark Office. Otherwise all copyright rights are reserved.
The present invention relates to programmable computer systems. More particularly, the present invention is directed to a computer product suited for dynamic design collaboration over a data network.
The evolution of many documents, such as architectural specifications, books, legal papers and other lengthy manuscripts may involve multiple iterations or contributions from multiple developers or both. During the evolution of the aforementioned documents, difficulties may arise with management and organization of the various changes made thereto. For example, it may be difficult to determine the developer who provides a contribution or which contribution may be attributed to any given developer. To that end, many document organizational techniques have been developed throughout history to manage and control the development of documents. A rudimentary management technique requires changes to be made directly to the document itself. The document, however, may quickly become unintelligible after many iterations by a single developer or through fewer iterations by multiple developers. In addition, many developers must be centrally located to make changes to the document, or the same copy of the document must be distributed to the many developers, both of which may prove inconvenient and time consuming.
The advent of copy machines facilitated development of a single iteration of a document by providing multiple copies of the same, which are then transmitted to multiple developers. Modern communication has substantially reduced the transmission time of a copy of a document under development to developers from a copy center and has practically abrogated the need for developers to meet at a centralized location. Management of multiple copies, each of which has differing changes to the same iteration of a document, is often cumbersome, time-consuming and inefficient. Computer technology has contributed to a reduction in many of the drawbacks involved with handling several copies of a document under development.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,341,469, for example, a computer system is employed to generate finished project plans and specifications for constructing a building, which includes a master specification and standardized information embedded in other documents. The system uses keynote references that are inserted into other documents, such as drawings produced by a CAD system, to construct a partial project knowledge base. The knowledge base is then used to guide the editing of a master specification to yield initial project plans and specifications. The keynote references are found in a catalog of standardized notes and are arranged to be searched by their attributes, using an interactive index utility. The keynote references are included on the CAD drawings, or like computer readable documents, from which they may be extracted for later use in constructing or updating a project knowledge base. The system provides a human interactive editing program that is used to augment, through questions and answers, the project knowledge base with information not present in the referenced keynote. Finally, the master specification is edited using the information in the project knowledge base to yield the finished project specification in the form of a set of document files which are then edited to form a final plans and specifications for project construction.
Management of document development has been further aided by recent development of data networks, such as the xe2x80x9cInternetxe2x80x9d. The Internet typically includes a plurality of users employing client terminals communicating with a remote server computer to transfer information therebetween. To facilitate the transfer, the client terminals have a xe2x80x9cwebxe2x80x9d browser that provides graphical user interface (GUI)-based communication with a xe2x80x9cweb pagexe2x80x9d obtained from a server. One popular collection of servers uses a standardized Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to provide information and is known as the xe2x80x9cWorld Wide Web.xe2x80x9d The information is typically presented as web pages written as text with standardized formatting and control symbols known as Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML). HTML provides basic document formatting and allows a server to specify xe2x80x9clinksxe2x80x9d to other servers and files. Use of an HTML-compliant browser involves specification of a link via a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Upon such specification, the user""s client terminal makes a TCP/IP request to the server identified in the link and receives an HTML file that is interpreted by the browser so that a electronic HTML document made up of one or more web pages may be displayed on the client""s terminal.
What is needed, however, is an integrated document development method and system that facilitates dynamic design collaboration by multiple developers over a data network.
The present invention provides a computer product for developing documents which allows simultaneously displaying the document being developed, changes to the document and a history of changes made to the document. The product is employed on a computer system of the type having a processor, a display and a memory in data communication with both the processor and the display. The computer product includes code for segmenting the display into a plurality of regions, displaying, in one of the regions, a document file having viewable information associated therewith, displaying, in a second of the regions, a message file; and displaying, in a third of the regions, a plurality of message headers, with a subset of the message headers providing a summary of content in the message file and the message file providing a description of a subportion of the viewable information.
A subportion of the plurality of message headers provide a summary of content of differing message files and a varying step is implemented which varies the subportion of the viewable information by displaying one of the differing message files. A tool palette and a cursor are present on the display, with the tool palette being positioned in a fourth region of thereof. The tool palette has one or more tool-defining regions. Each tool-defining region specifies a predetermined operation that modifies a subportion of the viewable information, defining an annotation. The annotation typically includes formation of a line on the document file and may have any one of various shapes, such as an ellipse, a circle or a polyhedron. The content of the message file includes data corresponding to the annotation.
The document file and the message file may be any type of computer readable file. Examples of the documents file includes vector-based files, character based files and graphics files. The message file may consist of any of the aforementioned files, as well as an audio file or video streams. In a preferred embodiment, the method and system are employed over a data network, such as a local area network, a wide-area data network, e.g., the Internet and the like.